Jane Eyre remains popular

A newly released book - Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth - features Jane Eyre among other literary celebrities, both real and fictitious:

It's turn-of-the-century New York, a city bursting with new life as the old century's order makes way for the mercantile class. But in the Pinkerton household a nineteenth-century embarrassment remains. Alice Pinkerton. Alice isn't mad exactly, but she's not sane either. She is tolerated, free to wander about, free to accompany her family to tea parties - free to be treated like a simpleton. But in truth Alice's mind is razor sharp, honed by a restless imagination, years of reading and a profound contempt for her surroundings. Left alone to read, to think, she has devoured the world that brings her mind alive: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo, Whitman, Poe, they are her inspiration; Jane Eyre, Catherine Moreland, Desdemona her companions. As she moves through the witless world around her, observing its prejudices, its shallow culture and its vanity, it is society that prompts her observations, viewing all through the prism of the art that has sustained and nourished her lonely life.

It seems this one won't turn out to be a fiasco like Rock Me Gently by Judith Kelly. Last August Bloomsbury had to refrain from publishing the paperback edition since it was accused of plagiarism from various sources, Jane Eyre among others. Judge for yourselves:

~ Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë: 'That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence, which ... breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital. Semi- starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection: forty-five out of eighty girls lay ill at one time.'

~ Rock Me Gently: 'The convent was a cradle of fly bred infection at that time. With the oncoming of warm weather, disease had crept into the orphanage and breathed its foul breath through the kitchens and refectory. Lack of food, rat-ridden dormitories and clogged drains had primed the children to catch infections. Before May arrived, 45 out of 60 girls lay ill and classrooms stood almost empty.'

Indeed we'd all like to write like Charlotte Brontë, Ms Kelly, but not so very literally.

Categories: Books, In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë